Guess who's against baseball?

Drudge carries today a link to a fascinating radio report out of Washington, D.C. spotlighting who is putting up the money to campaign against the new baseball stadium in the Anacostia riverfront district. Turns out this guy doesn't care whether it's public or private money funding a home for the Washington Nationals. He doesn't want to lose his sex club businesses.

Yeah, businesses plural.

WTOP Radio has learned up to 20 percent of the $50,000 came from Robert Siegel, an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner whose business would have to move to make way for the stadium. Siegel is a major landowner on the South Capitol stadium site, an area that Siegel calls "D.C.'s unofficial Red Light district."

He owns 11 properties, several of which house gay nightclubs. He also owns a gay porn shop and adult theaters. He says he's spent $20,000 of his own money to keep from being displaced by a new stadium. The funding includes other efforts he undertook to keep out baseball, including neighborhood signs and lawyer fees. Some of the money went toward posters and radio ads, including one that ran on WTOP Radio.

Siegel says he's staying in the background because he doesn't want to cloud the issue of baseball with sex.

For the record, we are not big fans of public financing of sports arenas, but the very fact that a new baseball stadium would displace this man's sleaze industry is the best argument we've ever heard for the taxpayers picking up the bill. Siegel is too cute by half in insisting he wants to remain in the background to avoid clouding the baseball issue with "sex." Wrong word. Substitute sleaze and you have it just right.

There is much that is beautiful about Washington, D.C., and for anyone who has been there and traveled even a block or so off the beaten path, there is much that isn't, and that's a shame. The city ought to be a complete showcase for the best of America, but ensconced liberalism in the local politics has much of the city looking like a war zone.

Our nation's capital is one place that could use some incentives for capitalistic renovation. The D.C. mayor seems to understand this but much of the D.C. City Council does not. What the city does not need is to protect the old red light industries that merely prey upon the worst inclinations of humanity.